Thought of the day

Every system that fails has a reason for failure and a path to success. One will never find the second unless one respects the first.

Maxwell's parody of Robert Burns

Gin a body meet a body
Flyin' thro the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
Ilka impact has its measure
Ne'er a' ane hae I
Yet a' the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.
Gin a body meet a body
Altogether free,
How they travel afterwards
We do not always see.
Ilka problem has its method
By analytics high;
For me, I ken na ane o' them,
But what the waur am I?
-- James Maxwell

Things that matter to me...various insights from life and work

Don't forget how hard it was to learn what you now take for granted. adapted from BrowserUk

An amazing story and video Susan Boyle - plain looking unknown 47 year old singer who is going viral on YouTube and elsewhere after her Brit's Got Talent audition.
And some thought-provoking commentary in Huffington Post by Letty Cottin Pogrebin (founder of Ms Magazine) and Steve Young

print "hello, world..."; is syntactically correct, but doesn't do what I want. Namely be a CD inventory database.attributed to jcwren in the CB on 8-July-2002, on the user page of John M. Dlugosz

But note: This applies only to that particular incantation - if you wrap the call to readline(...) in a subroutine and use that instead, e.g. while($line=wrapped_readline(...)) the special behavior goes away.

to count the number of hash keys in constant time: scalar keys %somearray. Thanks, BrowserUk.